A col­lec­tion of recent announce­ment in the “brain games” or “brain train­ing games” space:

The Wii sets new gen­er­a­tional stan­dards for the videogame industry

• “The age­ing of the Japan­ese pop­u­la­tion com­pelled gamemaker Nin­tendo to widen its audi­ence. Now, the Wii is lead­ing the indus­try stan­dards. But hard­core gamers are still too impor­tant to be neglected.”

Strain your brain the smart way

• “George Har­ri­son, Nintendo’s senior vice pres­i­dent of mar­ket­ing and cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, has said that more than half of the company’s mar­ket­ing for Wii is aimed at adults. And the sys­tem has been pre­sented at con­ven­tions for the aging “gray gamer” pop­u­la­tion.” and talks about sudoku, Brain Age, Big Brain Acad­emy, and more.

SBT Announces the Acqui­si­tion of Quixit

• “Sci­en­tific Brain Train­ing (“SBT”), based in Lyon, France, today has announced that it has acquired all of the out­stand­ing shares of pri­vately held Quixit, Inc. SBT was pre­vi­ously a minor­ity share­holder of Quixit. Effec­tive today, Quixit will be renamed HAP­PYneu­ron, Inc.”

Lumos Labs just announced the release of lumos­ity. MyBrain­Trainer and Brain­Builder are still around.

Let me add our 2 cents to the conversation:

- Life­long learn­ing and brain exercise/ men­tal stimulation have been shown to reduce the prob­a­bil­ity of devel­op­ing Alzheimer’s-related symp­toms as we age. Now, no one spe­cific pro­gram has shown so far that it is bet­ter than another one in this regard. Some pro­grams have shown good results at train­ing and improv­ing spe­cific cog­ni­tive skills, which is dif­fer­ent. You can learn more at Alzheimer’s Dis­ease: too seri­ous to play with head­lines.

- How can one dis­tin­guish what is enter­tain­ment (which is not bad at all, but has unproven cog­ni­tive enhance­ment ben­e­fits) vs. real brain fit­ness pro­grams? We sug­gest that, before buy­ing any pro­gram, you get clear answers to the ques­tions in the Brain Fit­ness Check­list below. A very impor­tant ques­tion is num­ber 2: if you want pro­grams with solid sci­ence behind, look for the name of the sci­en­tist behind in the PubMed data­base, “a ser­vice of the U.S. National Library of Med­i­cine that includes over 17 mil­lion cita­tions from MEDLINE and other life sci­ence jour­nals for bio­med­ical arti­cles back to the 1950s.” Good qual­ity peer-reviewed research will appear there.

For more infor­ma­tion on each ques­tion, see:

	10 Ques­tions to Choose the Right Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for You Down­load
	10 Ques­tions to Choose the Right Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for You (book­mark size) Down­load

You can find more infor­ma­tion in our Brain Fit­ness Top­ics sec­tion. Please let us know if you have any suggestions-thanks!